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LONG BLOG

A few hours ago, there was an interview in the front page with Anita of feminist frequency, the comment section sort off exploded.

I'm not here to talk about that, I'm just gonna talk about games and broach on a few subjects.

What is a gamer exactly? A person that plays games, be in on your phone, those old tiger electronics, a gameboy, it doesn't matter, you play games and you're a gamer, so why need to draw lines in the sand between us?

I've always been fascinated at how gamers will distance themselves from each other, how quickly the collective hivemind of gamers will separate themselves based on what we like.

"Oh he likes military shooters, BUT ITS NOT THE I LIKE, I MUST HATE HIM"
"Oh he enjoys old consoles, BUT HE DOESN'T LIKE THE GENESIS, MUST HATE"
"Oh he likes rpg's, BUT HE LIKES JAPANESE ONES, HATE, HATE, HATE"

Why? Why is this necessary? Why can't we simply come to an understanding in the hobby we all love and enjoy.

It doesn't end there, look at these situations with this Anita and woman or the Felicia Day fiasco. In both situations anyone who disagrees is shouted down, has anyone even sat down and watched all of Anita's videos? Her arguments are based on strawmen and opinions regarding this in her comment sections are outright deleted or voted down, the thing with Day was also another explosion, if you agreed with Ryan you where apparently a sexist pig and other such nonsense, in the end it was Ryan's opinion but really, was has Felicia done for the gaming community?

Nothing, if anything she's hurt it by perpetuating the geek stereotype in her show, she's gotten voice acting jobs over much more talented people, she even landed a role on Eureka where you can see just how bad an actress she really is.

I'm not attacking Felicia the person, I am merely questioning her contributions to gaming as a whole, and I question them because all the apologies after the Ryan thing read like something you would say to to a huge game developer or someone that contributed something to gaming that left a huge mark like say Wolfestein and the FPS foundation it created.

These 2 issues show us just narrow these points of view are, why are just focusing on this when we could take a chance and look at so much more.

Men in videogames are always something so unreal, one of the biggest complaints in this modern era is all the meatheads that are the protagonists, or the pretty boys found in some RPG's, look at Nathan Drake, the man goes on insane grand adventures and looks he just got out of doing his hair before a photoshoot, the man is gorgeous, hell look at Gordon Freeman, a nuclear physicist.

See this bearded old dude? That's Stanton Friedman, that is what a nuclear physicist looks like, not a gorgeous man like Freeman, of course no gamer is going to play as a bearded old dude, that's just how we are, we project onto these characters, videogames are purely about escapism after all.

But why stop at all these simplistic tropes, what about ethnic representation in games?

We have so few african american characters that don't act like huge stereotypes, we have so few black main characters, period, the biggest one I can think off right is Carl fom San Andreas and even he fell under the stereotype bus cause it was all about the hood and other black culture cliches.

A black man is a person just you and me, only the color of our skin separates us, so why do games have such a trouble showing this, why must the black person be the loudest in the group? Or even the thief sometimes.

What about latinos? I'm a latina and I laugh my ass off at the representation of my culture in videogames, according to Capcom we're all axe wielding maniacs, according to Rockstar we're all thugs who speak in broken Portuguese or english, other games have us talking half spanish, half english, or cursing in spanish.

My point is this, the issue of misandry in games or feminist tropes is to small, we need to look at the bigger picture, we need talk about ALL the issues we see games in everyday, not just one small subset of it, I play games, I am gamer and quite frankly none of these issues bother me, but if they bother you then say something, speak up, if you want things to change we need to sit down and talk about all of this, not just the small sub-issues. Not only that, we need to stop sorting ourselves into camps simply because of what we choose to enjoy.

Maybe I can't hope to understand why CoD is so popular, but you know what? I can respect it, and I can respect YOU, the person who enjoys it.

I don't expect to change anyone's mind but I hope you at least respect that guy on your friends list who plays Atelier Meru, right alongside that guy that plays MW3 all day.